Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801), American poet & writer

Benjamin West (American 18th century painter): his family (there is a drawing of Elizabeth by West in the Historical Society of Pennysylvania)

Dear friends and readers,

On April 12th of this spring at a monthly meeting of the Washington Area Print Group I heard Rodney Mader tell the story of the life and writing of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, a learned woman from an upper class family in Pennsylvania. He gave a paper on her long melancholy autobiographical poem, The Deserted Wife, which prompted a lively 45 minute discussion afterward. This matter makes a fitting coda for the predominant themes of my blogs on the ASECS meeting at Cleveland this year: women’s life-writing, unconventional choices, and poetry.

Fergusson’s life course is intriguingly puzzling. She begins as a socialite, admired and well-read writer thoroughly ensconced in the local high cultural milieu. When young, she was engaged to Benjamin Franklin’s son; she wrote & circulated a Trip to Great Britain, an outgoing sophisticated travel book. She then marries Henry Hughes Fergusson, who became a loyalist during the American revolution. When Henry is thought to have impregnated a servant girl, Jenny, in her friend’s house, Elizabeth estranges herself from him. Although she refuses to listen to his pleas from England (where he eventually went) that he was guiltless of impregnating the girl and for her to return and live with him in the UK, she writes a poignant poem showing how intensely she feels the degradation of her position and loss of her husband. She remains angry with him for undermining the servant of her friend. Her grating and obsessive behavior eventually alienates all her friends (she is regarded as a pest) so she ends up a reclusive woman writing an unpublishable poem and late in life a translation of Fenelon’s Telemaque (a 17th century sequel to The Odyssey, all about Odysseus son’s education).

How did she change from publicly engaged woman to someone whose books were her friends. Prof Mader tended to account for Fergusson’s decision through her husband’s Scots loyalism. She was forced (unwillingly) to separate herself from this. The colony wanted to confiscate her property as that of the wife of a treacherous man. She was devoted to the place and it had been central to her identity. Nontheless, she fled her home at Graeme Park and lived with a friend, Betsy Stedman for the last 30 years of her life. But she did not find solace in this arrangement. Her poem tells her tale as an aching story of sexual betrayal and unhinging sorrow. Fergusson imitates Pope’s Eloisa and is like Richardson’s Clarissa; she alludes to Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Edward Young, James Thomson, Henry Mackenzie, Lord Chesterfield. Prof Mader suggested the poem represents a moving gesture of containment and self-control.

In the discussion afterward one scholar brought up the large Quaker community nearby. Was it a Quaker influence which led Fergusson to insist for real that sexual infidelity is not to be tolerated. Most women at the time would say they would not accept sexual infidelity but quietly tolerated it. Men were allowed to have mistresses. Quaker women’s culture provided for an empowerment of women: they would not tolerate the husband’s infidelities. Prof Mader said he believed that Jenny’s child was her husband’s; she had been a servant in the house of Charles Stedman, her friend Betsy’s uncle. Her Quaker friends would be against loyalism to the UK. Against that she seems trapped by social structures — did not want the kind of conformity whether unconventional or not Quakers demanded of their members. She wrote she did not like the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps (I suggested) she simply preferred not to marry, to live with and among women. People agreed that made sense. But there was her continual fight to re-gain her property which she spent so much on she ended up a bankrupt.

In talking about the poem, Prof Mader said Fergusson ventriloquizes (uses) other poets’ voices. The poem is very melancholy, a Penseroso. That it was not common for women to write private poetry. A couple of us disputed that. I pointed outAnne Finch who wrote of her private autobiographical experience through the masks of translation, fables, and public genres, to Charlotte Smith who simply openly wrote autobiographically (for which she was castigated by Anna Seward and often criticized by others). Another woman scholar talked of life-writing in later 17th century poetry of other women.

It’s a book history group and people also talked of the history of the manuscript, how people in the era kept commonplace books. The US had an oral culture. The interested reader can read the poem (published for the first time), together with Prof Mader’s introduction’ in “Rodney Mader, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s ‘The Deserted Wife’,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 135:2 (April 2011):151-90.

Engraved print of later 19th century impressionist painting by a woman, Tina Blau (1845 – 1916), Spring at the Prater

2 Responses

I’ve looked at some of EGF’s stuff, and agree that she’s an extremely intriguing figure. From what I’ve seen, her isolation in the latter part of her life is partly due to her poor choice in marrying Henry, who became infamous for his Loyalism, and partly because of the eclipse of her entire Loyalist, Anglican Scots circle in Philadelphia following the revolution. She was part of William Smith’s circle prior to the Revolution, and so far as I know none of those folks retained anything close to their former status afterwards.